LinkedIn is all sorts of messed up & backwards. Last week Darren Nix wrote about “the absurdity of LinkedIn” which basically pointed out how logged out users have more benefits than signed-in users. The thread got hundreds of comments on Hacker News from folks talking about how terrible it is as a platform and social network.

Anyway, if you search for someone on LinkedIn and land on their profile you will be asked to connect with them. In order to do this, LinkedIn makes you “prove” that you’ve worked with them in the past or say that you are their friend.

Although I do not know Matt personally, I do follow him on Twitter, have interacted with him in this past, and

Once you’ve connected you are taken to a magical page where LinkedIn will show you groups of people they recommend you follow.

At this point, LinkedIn no longer cares how or if you know these people, and doesn’t even require you to send an invitation. Just clickidy-click your little heart out.

But wait, there’s more!

If you really want to kick your invite game into high gear, try searching for a niche on LinkedIn such as “programmers” or “SEO.”

On the right pane if you select “people” you can bypass the invite request process and kick things into high gear.

Using this method, you can invite hundreds of people in your niche to become a connection.

In a little under an hour, I went from under 500 connections to almost 2000 connections! All of these people are “in my niche” and fit in really well with my interests.

If you are going to go on an inviting spree, don’t forget to change your default invite message. The default one is kind of predator-ish.

Another way to make this happen is open up the LinkedIn mobile app, run a search and invite people in your industry.

It has been a few weeks since I have discovered this little trick and I still continue to get anywhere from 5-20 new connections everyday.

LinkedIn will continue to surprise me with new “features” each time I use it and who knows maybe one day it will even make sense!